Common Fallacies
Below are five common fallacies used when making arguments: The Strawman Fallacy. The Strawman fallacy is aptly named after a harmless, lifeless, scarecrow. In the straw man fallacy, someone attacks a position the opponent doesn’t really hold. Instead of contending with the actual argument, he or she instead attacks the equivalent of a lifeless bundle of straw, which the opponent never intended upon defending anyway. Straw man fallacies are a cheap and easy way to make one’s position look stronger than it is. Using this fallacy, opposing views are characterized as “non-starters,” lifeless, truth less, and wholly unreliable. By comparison, one’s own position will look better for it. Appeal To Ignorance. Any time ignorance is used as a major premise in support of an argument, it’s liable to be a fallacious appeal to ignorance. Interestingly, this fallacy is often used to bolster multiple contradictory conclusions at once. Consider the following two claims: “No one has ever been able to prove definitively that extra-terrestrials exist, so they must not be real.” “No one has ever been able to prove definitively that extra-terrestrials do not exist, so they must be real.” If the same argument strategy can support mutually exclusive claims, then it’s not then it’s not a good argument strategy. Slippery Slope You may have used this fallacy on your parents as a teenager: “But, you have to let me go to the party! If I don’t go to the party, I’ll be a loser with no friends. Next thing you know I’ll end up alone and jobless living in your basement when I’m 30!” The slippery slope fallacy works by moving from a seemingly benign premise or starting point and working through a number of small steps to an improbable extreme. This fallacy is not just a long series of causes. Some causal chains are perfectly reasonable. There could be a complicated series of causes which are all related, and we have good reason for expecting the first cause to generate the last outcome. The slippery slope fallacy, however, suggests that unlikely or ridiculous outcomes are likely when there’s just not enough evidence to think so. Circular Argument When a person’s argument is just repeating what they already assumed beforehand, it’s not arriving at any new conclusion. We call this a circular argument or circular reasoning. If someone says, “the Bible is true because the Bible says it’s true"—that’s a circular argument. One is assuming that the Bible only speaks truth, and so they trust it to truthfully report that it speaks the truth. This fallacy is a kind of presumptuous argument where it only appears to be an argument. It’s really just restating one’s assumptions in a way that looks like an argument. You can recognize a circular argument when the conclusion also appears as one of the premises in the argument. Appeal to Authority This fallacy happens when we misuse an authority. This misuse of authority can occur in a number of ways. We can cite only authorities — steering conveniently away from other testable and concrete evidence as if expert opinion is always correct. Or we can cite irrelevant authorities, poor authorities, or false authorities. It’s tough to see, sometimes, because its normally a good responsible move to cite relevant authorities supporting your claim. It can’t hurt. But if all you have are authorities, and everyone just has to “take their word for it” without any other evidence to show that those authorities are correct, then you have a problem. Often this fallacy refers to irrelevant authorities — like citing a foot doctor when trying to prove something about Psychiatry; his or her expertise is in an irrelevant field. When citing authorities to make your case, you need to cite relevant authorities, but you also need to represent them correctly, and make sure their authority is legitimate.